


songs of clay-dirt-born children

by AllegoriesInMediasRes



Series: Mahabharata fics [13]
Category: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Genre: (slightly) Unreliable Narrator, Bitterness, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Oneshot, Post-War, slightly meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 22:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16207046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/pseuds/AllegoriesInMediasRes
Summary: The bards sing of brothers five, all born of gods, all as loyal to each other as any seasoned soldiers, even when the eldest had traded them away.“My brothers were just as loyal to each other,” Dushala says. “They numbered a hundred, and yet not one of them wavered in their dedication to Dada. Even when conscience and peril threatened, they all perished at Kurukshetra in his name. But no one wants to hear songs of a horde of clay-dirt-born children, do they?





	songs of clay-dirt-born children

The bards sing of brothers five, all born of gods, all as loyal to each other as any seasoned soldiers, even when the eldest had traded them away.

“My brothers were just as loyal to each other,” Dushala says. “They numbered a hundred, and yet not one of them wavered in their dedication to Dada. Even when conscience and peril threatened, they all perished at Kurukshetra in his name. But no one wants to hear songs of a horde of clay-dirt-born children, do they?”

* * *

The world swoons at the name of the Pandavas, kshatriyas fierce and favored, all of them. In particular Arjuna, called the greatest warrior of the Dwapara Yuga, his every thought worshipped by the world, so much that if there were a chronicle of the universe, one volume alone would be dedicated to his doubt.

“Only because his guru put him on a pedestal and personally manipulated dharma to place him at the forefront,” Dushala scoffs.

She had been there, the day Dronacharya showed them the bird in the tree and asked them what they saw. Lore speaks of how all hundred brutish Kaurava princes failed the test, yet no one speaks of how the other four Pandavas also could not focus on the bird’s eye, to the exclusion of all else. Only Arjuna, and only because he knew exactly what his guru wanted to hear him say.

“And in the end, nobody truly cared the path his arrows took, so long as they hit their target. But it’s so much easier to pretend Arjuna was more special than the rest.”

* * *

Panchaali’s star burns bright in the firmament of history, a supernova of rage and revenge whose brilliance dims every other sun in the sky. She is the woman on whom yugas end and begin, who married and united five brothers into legend.

“Her arrogance widowed a hundred and one of her own sister-in-laws, who had protested her humiliation” Dushala reminds. “When the Lord made his vows to her, he himself worded it like that. _The Kaurava women shall weep as you do_. She rendered eighteen akshauhini other women sonless, fatherless, brotherless. Yet why is it her plight that every listener is expected to rue?”

* * *

Abhimanyu’s last stand cuts at every mother’s heart: golden, guileless, brave in the face of overwhelmingly adharmic opponents, and only sixteen years old. The Upapandavas’ slaughter chokes every father’s throat: butchered at midnight, just when the war had ended, by a bitter madman.

“No one speaks of their cousin, Lakshman Kumar, who was scarcely older than them and cut down like a reed. Their other cousins, the Kaurava grand-spawn numbering in the hundreds if not thousands? Does anyone even care to know their names?” Dushala asks. “My own Suradha is a footnote to history, dying not on the battlefield but out of pathetic fright at the thought that the Ashvamedha Yagna foretold a second war.”

She has watched them grow, from striplings pinching each other in the gardens of Hastinapur to youths sneaking poison into each other’s meals to princes snatching at the others’ queens to kings drenching the world in blood for each others’ crowns. At times it all seems no more than a squabble over the earth’s shiniest toy, and yet the world seems ready to take sides based on whoever has the most well-crafted story on why they deserved it more, how they have suffered more, and how anyone else’s troubles cannot be more than their own.

Dushala is an old woman now, her hair white and her eyes furrowed and her bleeding long since stopped, who has cremated every man she ever cared for, a grandmother serving as regent for an infant king. Yet there are times when she still feels like the sole princess of Hastinapur, watching as the boys fight and the elders play favorites, peeking out from behind her nurse’s skirt at the machinations of a man’s world that she has no say in, yet will burn her own world to ashes.


End file.
